Tuesday, May 12, 2015

We will use unattended installation to install Exchange 2013 server into existing Exchange 2010 SMTP organization. These simple steps can easily reduce the time it takes to install Exchange 2013 servers into your environment.

Sizing for Exchange 2013 has been completed per Microsoft best practices. This is where you do not want to make any mistakes and hopefully invested a good month of time to complete the correct build per the given environment.

Active Directory Schema has been updated, Upper schema range has been updated:

Environments require change control process , and process oriented ( regulated) it is best to perform schema changes ahead of time, rather performing with first Exchange 2013 server installation. My simple reasoning is, schema changes are critical, and one way street. Changes to schema and .DIT database should be treated as a major task. Performing schema changes ahead of time and let it baked also provides proof of concept to your client.

Make sure the server has been added to domain , it has static IP address and it has been configured to be in compliance with your environment.( All security patches and other required software has installed and configured)

Make sure you have obtained all required approvals and satisfied your change management process and scheduled this installation in the LAB (production like environment) first and after successful implementation you may deploy same solution in the production environment.

Test before you do it in the production, catch any issues may raise up and document the fixes as you plan production installation.

LAB preparation: ( Please make sure this fits into your needs)

Widows Server Enterprise Edition R2 is installed the drive and LUN assignment are present as follows:

C: 120 GIG (OS Drive & Exchange binaries)

E: 20 TB (LUN)

D: CD-ROM

Copy and save below simple code into notepad and re-name the file as “Install.ps1” note: change any of the parameters as you wish.

Monday, May 11, 2015

Exchange 2016 and its futures announced at ignite 2015. Many exciting futures are on the way. Here is summary of topology requirements and few of the highlights, what has changed with Exchange Server 2016.

Single Role = Mailbox Server Role ( Prior to Exchange 2016, multi-role deployments were MS best practices, With E16 , there is no choice but single role (-:

Edge Role will be released with RTM release.

CAS Server role has been transitioned into Client Access proxy , service components. At this point all server roles collapse into single Mailbox Server role.

Sunday, May 3, 2015

Ignite is going alive real soon less than 17hr as I write this blog. Those of you who are attending will be getting tons of rich content and meet with Exchange 2016 at ignite.

What we should expect from the new release of Exchange 2016. As you might have already noticed from the IT evolving business, the push for cloud world is increasing each year and one way or other many businesses are moving into cloud space. At the least hybrid configuration is fairly common among agencies.

Few highlights provided by MS Exchange team,

To highlight a few examples:

A new approach to document collaboration that makes it easy to send links and collaborate without versioning issues of attachments

Faster and more intelligent search, to help users quickly find what they need in their mailboxes and calendars

If we consider how much Microsoft has invested to Cloud and its surrounding technologies and infrastructure , it is very easy to predict or make educated guess that only online version of most major applications will continue to grow and get better, while on premises versions might not offer all of the futures.

The changes are inevitable , adapting these changes for IT Pros will occur one way or other. On premises version of major applications might be lacking from future development unless the businesses start investing their own infrastructure to support these application and their managed environment.Of course all these are assumptions with what I have been seeing over few years.

I will come back and update this article especially with improvement related to Exchange 2016 on premises and some of the Office 365 highlights. Office 365 has evolved over the years and now it is providing supper reasonable solid messaging platform to many businesses. Extending Office 365 to Government and its related agencies seems to be also expending, although Government agencies are very slow to adapt these IT changes.

Advantage of office 365 are pretty obvious. The new future releases with office 365 very easy to adopt in general, less to manage, less to worry.

Looking forward for ignite news for Exchange 2016 both on premises and Office 365 platforms.